


The Summer Country

by MotteAndBailey



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Animal Abuse (implied), Holocaust references, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Murder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicide, War, Well that ended up being a lot darker than I expected
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 14:45:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5669761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotteAndBailey/pseuds/MotteAndBailey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter is the first apprentice for a very long time. There hasn’t been one for fifty years. The oath was last taken in nineteen sixty-one.  Thomas Nightingale knew his duty. He was the last Wizard who could take on an apprentice and he wasn’t getting any younger.  He needed to train another Wizard while he still had a decade of life left in his tired body. Someone tough, someone smart, someone who was willing to pick up Thomas’s responsibilities when he was finally released from his oaths.<br/>So why isn’t there another Wizard in the Folly? He would be in his seventies by now - barring accidents, of course.  </p><p>Spoilers to Foxglove Summer</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Summer Country

Present day

  
‘Who did paint the pictures of you and Molly?’ Peter asked. He was lazing on his computer chair, long runner’s legs crossed at the ankle. ‘You look older so I’d guess that they’re from some time ago.’ He grinned and shook his head. ‘That still sounds strange.’

  
‘The son of a friend,’ I said shortly. ‘He took up painting as a hobby and needed sitters.’ Peter was usually good at picking up hints that I didn’t want to talk about something. He would lose interest soon enough and return to his animated game. I’d been dividing my attention between my rugby and him, and I knew that his cartoon character had fallen off a cliff. He would need to re-play the last five minutes or so of his game. By my reckoning, this was the seventh time he had attempted it.

  
His face lost all expression. I knew that sign: it was something I’d seen in coppers for almost a hundred years. He’d thought of something and he didn’t want me to pick up any hints of approval or disapproval and modify my answers to please him or mollify him. He wasn’t going to drop this line of questioning this time.

  
‘So it is a painting of you,’ he said.

  
‘It is,’ I agreed.

  
‘Accurate?’

  
‘Up to a point,’ I said. I was sure that my hair had been thicker than Laurent’s interpretation of it.

  
‘And your eyes - were they blue, once?’

  
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Is this interrogation going anywhere?’ I knew I was being rude, but I wanted him to drop his questioning.

  
‘My eyes have changed colour,’ he said.

  
I got up to look at him, using the excuse of close inspection to touch his cheek and temple. His once black irises were now a rich deep chestnut. I could see his pupils and I knew that the first time I had met him, I couldn’t tell if his pupils had widened when he looked at me. I had been checking. Apprenticing him wasn’t the first thing I had thought of doing with him but he’d shown no interest in men at all, and certainly none in me.  
‘It’s something to do with the trip into fairyland,’ he said. ‘When did your eyes change colour?’

  
‘I don’t know,’ I lied. ‘Are you worried that you’ll be going through adolescence again shortly, backwards?’ Lord knows I was worried about it until I settled into being forty or so for a few decades.

  
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not everyone who goes into Fairyland gets younger as a result. But everyone who goes into Fairyland comes back a little different.’

  
He waited; I waited. I could wait longer than him.

  
‘When was that picture painted?’ he asked.

  
I saw no reason not to answer. He loved puzzling things out and watching him think was tremendously entertaining. He would distract himself with theories and I would be off the hook. ‘In the early sixties.’  
‘And your eyes changed after that picture was painted,’ he prompted. ‘You said that you had started to grow younger in the early seventies…’

  
‘I don’t have an exact date,’ I said. ‘My aches and pains weren’t bothering me as much, then my contacts in the Home Office were retiring and I drew a few comments about being well-preserved at their retirement dinners and I started to become suspicious that I wasn’t getting any older. I didn’t have any definitive evidence for years: I simply didn’t cross from late middle age to early old age. Varvara may have pinpointed a date but I have no recollection of anything unusual happening.’  
‘Liar,’ Peter said amiably, making me startle. He was getting better at reading me. He wasn’t annoyed by my untruth: he was simply stating that he knew I had fibbed. ‘Remind me to have a game of high-stakes poker with you some time. You think lying to me isn’t honourable and you look embarrassed when you do it.’

  
He waited; I waited. This time, I cracked first. He did have a right to know what I was asking of him. I had felt vaguely guilty since he’d taken the oath. I had sworn to protect him and I had told myself that some knowledge was too great a burden for a young man like Peter. I was lying, it was dishonourable to with-hold the full scope of his responsibilities from him.

  
‘The picture was painted by my first apprentice after the War. He was invalided out of the Army and his mother sent me a letter asking me to find a job for him.’

1961

  
‘Father told me stories,’ Captain Laurent Mellenby said. ‘He died when I was ten, but I still remember some of his tales. Magic and school pranks and staffs, and a house in London where all the Wizards gathered.’ He looked around the lobby, at the statue of Newton and at Molly who was watching him. Her stillness was uncanny. ‘And a maidservant who was much more than she seemed. When I grew up I thought that he was telling stories and the magic tricks he had shown me were stage-magician nonsense.’  
She looked at me, and through the weird glamour which Molly uses to communicate, I knew that she recognised David in him as well. It was in the angle of his neck as it met his shoulders, in his alert remaining eye and his restless hands which I knew that he wanted to drop into his pockets. Six years of Army discipline was stopping him. David had always had such cold hands. He had told me that only the threat of having his palms caned had prevented him from sloping around School with his hands in his pockets. I hoped that his son hadn’t suffered such threats.

  
‘Those stories were true,’ I said, ‘and the magic was real.’

  
Laurent - not Mellenby, I could never call him by his father’s name - smiled. At least his smile was his mother’s, I thought. Seeing David’s smile on this twenty-five year old boy would be too much. ‘Even the animated snake skin?’  
‘Even that,’ I said. ‘I can show you it again if it would help you to believe in all of this.’

  
He agreed and followed me into the depths of the Folly. The slippery tiled floors were causing him some difficulty but he waved me away when I offered him my assistance. His stubbornness was familiar to me: it was similar to my own. He’d lost half of his muscles in one leg and come within half a day of having it amputated. He’d lost an eye. It was an accident, a car crash in West Germany, and it was his misfortune and no-one else’s, and drawing attention to his disability was humiliating to him. We went to the lab which I had requested Molly dust last week when I had first heard of Captain Mellenby’s discharge from hospital. To David’s lab.

  
The snake-skin was in one of the many specimen drawers which lined one side of the room. Some hedge-witch recipes had called for the most unusual ingredients. David had been fascinated by them, studying them to try to discern the logic behind their construction and whether they hid a wiser use of magic than Newtownian Wizardry. There must be another way to perform magic, he’d said, one which didn’t result in the death of the practitioner.

  
I laid it on the lab bench, not looking at the scores that the shotgun pellets had left on the wall behind me. Such a messy way to die.

 

  
The spell was complicated, but not so complicated that my thirteen year old self had not been able to master it. Fifth-order, ending with vivat serpentum simulacrum. And the snake skin rustled across the bench as though it was alive.

  
Laurent watched it with shocked fascination. If David had not died, I thought, then this would be no more than a schoolroom prank to him. He would have taught his son magic and David’s wife would have suffered the pranks with the same humour and gift for retaliation that had drawn him to her. He’d proposed when his eyes were still watering from eating the pepper-stuffed chocolate she had created for him. He’d told me later that he’d admitted to her that he wouldn’t be the best husband, and she’d told him that she would make no sort of wife at all. Her devotion to her dear friend Penelope and his to gay bachelorhood had made it a marriage of minds. Laurent was an only child.

  
‘I remember old Rawling’s face when he opened his desk and saw the snake-skin writhing about inside,’ I said. ‘He was horrified. He hated snakes. He gave me ten swishes of the cane, but it was worth it.’ Rawling had been the Geography Master. He had taken pleasure in mocking me for my difficulty in spelling the cities and rivers of the Empire for two years by the time I took my revenge.

  
‘Father didn’t say you’d been punished for it,’ Laurent said.

  
The snake-skin caught on a scar in the wood and thrashed about to free itself. The flapping was a simulacrum of life, not life itself, but its struggles were too realistic. I lifted it and put it back in the centre of the bench. It continued its blind explorations. The spell might last another half hour or so before fading. I knew I could trust Molly to make sure it didn’t get itself stuck again. She was watching from the doorway. Magic had always attracted her and I was doing too little of it for her taste.

  
‘A violent beating is hardly a fitting end to a bedtime story,’ I said. My backside twinged in remembered agony. Fifty years have passed, I thought, and Rawling has been in his grave for the past thirty, and he still had the power to make me furious. Some men liked power too much and took a vicious revenge when their illusion of total power was spoilt. ‘Come through to the library. I want to explain what an apprenticeship means.’

  
I’d had to look it up myself. After Casterbridge had been founded, the traditional ten-year apprenticeship to a Wizard had fallen out of favour. Fortunately I had found a copy of the Master’s Primer which had been written in the early Nineteenth century for the benefit of Wizard Masters who did not want to compose a program of study for their apprentices. It had the Oath, the expectations of both Master and Apprentice and a time-tested program of study which had resulted in competent if unimaginative Wizards. I trusted David’s son to add the imagination which would result in brilliance.

 

Present Day

  
‘Laurent was an apprentice to me, but there were a few other Wizards still living at the Folly who supervised his practice as well. Most of them were at least fifteen or twenty years older than me – funerals were a regular feature of Folly life. He used to come up here, to the coach house, to remind himself that he was still a young man.’

  
‘There weren’t any other apprentices even though there were a few Masters?’ Peter asked.

  
‘No - none. I was the youngest master and we considered it unfair to apprentice a young man to someone likely not to live anotehr decade, and I was too busy with Police business to have the time for more than one. And there was a shortage of volunteers. None of the old Wizarding families wanted anything to do with the Folly. There was a great deal of anger and recriminations after the War. Surviving Wizards broke their staffs and the Wizards who had been too old to take part in the conflict followed their lead.’

  
I wanted to change the subject. My friends had expected me to follow suit in rejecting the Folly’s leadership. I couldn’t: I knew my duty. Their ostracism of me in the Fifties was a still raw wound - rawer than Ettersburg.

  
‘A Primer,’ Peter said. ‘I should have guessed that someone would have written a schoolmaster’s guide to teaching magic. Are you sticking to it?’

  
‘Mostly,’ I hedged.

  
The Primer was highly academic in outlook and had not covered much in the way of combat magic. Peter’s duties being what they were, and modern education being what it is, I had altered it to suit him better. But the progression of spell complexity was still of use. I found, to my surprise, that the basic principles had been in use at Casterbridge a hundred years later. I sometimes found myself chuckling over old memories and spells which had little or no application outside the schoolroom.

  
James Lambert had accidentally turned a lux spell into an orb which bobbed around after him for hours. The Headmaster had called him ‘sunny Jim’ for the rest of his school career. Eving and Rupert minor had discovered that it was possible to use a siphoning spell to fill a water-bomb with ink and then lob it with impello through Rawling’s open study window. I caught myself wondering if Seawoll had a study and whether he ever left the window open. And, of course, there was the ever-amusing personal rainstorm. That had been a marginal note left by a frustrated Master for use on apprentices who were easily distracted. I hadn’t needed it with Laurent. He was fanatical about magic. I forced him to take up painting to keep him from constant practice and magical injury.

 

1962

  
‘Ettersburg,’ Laurent said. One year into his apprenticeship and he wouldn’t drop the topic.

  
I disliked talking about it and I knew that Laurent was sharp enough to pick up on my silences. But he was wearing me down. If I grew pensive, he would prompt me into reminiscing about my War. My memories grew dull in the retelling: instead of gunfire and the terrible screams of men trapped in burning Tiger tanks, I heard my own voice talking about Night Witches flying overhead in the dark and the grunt and snuffle of Almas as they tracked the Werewolves through the rubble of Leningrad. I knew I wasn’t alone in this. The cinema was full of films re-telling the War as though it had been a grand adventure. And he would try, once again, to draw the subject round to the twilight of English Wizards.

  
‘I heard Father talking about what you found inside the castle,’ he said. ‘He said to Mother ‘Thomas was right. I thought it was possible to rescue them, but they were too far gone.’ And he said something about vampires being fed on the fae, and I heard him crying. I thought his mind had cracked.’

  
Dear God, he must only have been nine or ten, I thought. Far too young to hear of such things. But Laurent was a child of the War. He’d spent his early childhood with air-raids and doodlebugs and the neighbours being bombed out. So many people clung to a grim hatred of the Germans. I tried not to - I tried to tell myself that they had all regretted their actions after the madness had cleared from their minds - but I couldn’t meet one who was old enough to have participated without asking myself what he or she had done during the war.

  
And it wasn’t as though ten year olds hadn’t been at Ettersburg. A ten year old who knows he’s going to die while the adults who have condemned him to death watch and make notes does not look at the world through a child’s eyes any longer. Even in death, when their eyes have no business seeing any longer, they look so distressed that someone could hate them enough to kill them. They’re so young that they take it as a result of a fault in their conduct. They ask what they have done to deserve death as though they can atone for it.

  
How old should a boy be before he learned the terrible truth of what humanity was capable of? Was a twenty-six year old experienced enough to understand that not everyone was cruel? He had dedicated his life to rebuilding English Wizardry after that catastrophe. It was unfair of me not to explain what had happened.

  
‘Ettersburg was a rout,’ I said. ‘The Folly had little interest in combat magic, unlike the defenders. We should never have attempted it.’

  
‘Why did you?’ he asked. He was calm, smooth-voiced, like he was trying to persuade a skittish horse to bend his head for the halter.

  
‘I was ordered to.’

 

Present day

  
My current apprentice had taken the same calming attitude. Was it something they taught at Hendon these days?

  
‘You teach me combat magic,’ he said, when it became clear that I had stopped talking.

  
‘It was something of a specialty interest, not something the average Wizard would need,’ I said. ‘Faceless knows it, so you should know it too. But back then… ‘Peace in our time’ was always a lie. We were preparing for war from ’36 onwards. I was an instructor in combat magic but that stopped once war was declared and I was needed in active service.’

  
‘The Folly was more important in those days, I suppose,’ Peter said.

  
‘Not important enough according to some Wizards,’ I said. ‘Paterston was very keen to expand the Folly’s sphere of influence. He did the same job as me before the War and we both had the same rank - Captain. But he was much more ambitious than me. I wanted to get the job done, and he wanted…’ I hesitated. I disliked speaking ill of the dead.

  
‘He wanted to get the job done in a way which made it clear that he was indispensable,’ Peter suggested.

  
‘Quite,’ I said. And the end result of his machinations was that I had ended up in Yorkshire as an instructor while Paterston stayed in London as the Folly’s Liaison Officer. He’d used my aversion to paperwork to justify exiling me from London. Once the ultra-secretive War Preparation Office had become accustomed to him, his importance was set in stone.

  
‘Yorkshire?’ Peter asked.

  
‘There was a country estate which was purchased by the Folly at some time in the nineteenth century,’ I said. ‘It was sold off after the War, and the proceeds were used to help injured Wizards. I remember it had lazy winds which blew straight through the building instead of going around it and was very remote. The house was ancient - fifteenth century in parts, and the plumbing was horrible. I wasn’t looking forward to being stationed there but someone had to do it.’

 

Spring 1939

  
‘We’ll look at fireballs after we’ve refreshed ourselves,’ I said. Eighteen faces turned towards me. We were mid-way between having a briefing in the proper military fashion, and having a little gathering in the finest Folly tradition. Cups of tea and slices of cake were on the table, rifles were leaning against it, and we had spent the morning attempting to march in step. I wasn’t standing at the front of the room as I would be in a Military briefing. This had nothing to do with my reluctance to give up my seat next to David Mellenby. It was because everyone here was an unranked volunteer, except me, and drawing attention to our differing status would be counterproductive. Most Wizards have a certain independence of mind which is antithetical to a military command structure.

  
‘These are of varying strength and calibre, just like any ordnance. A small fireball can kill a mosquito, a large one can kill an elephant. Control is everything: a fireball can exit a man and go through the hull of a ship if you are unpractised.’  
‘What’s the biggest fireball you have ever seen?’ David asked. He was twenty-two, a scholar who had visited Germany and knew that the coming fight would be desperate. He was utterly unsuited to any sort of active service, being easily distracted by scholarly thoughts. It annoyed me that he had been passed on to the combat course when his place could be taken by someone else, but his smile and the look of near hero-worship in his eyes when he looked at me had gone some way towards appeasing me.

  
‘I studied with the Sons of Wayland,’ I said, and stopped myself from adding ‘when I was your age.’ ‘Justin Smith tested a staff he’d made by leaning sheet-iron against the wall of the Smithy and sending a fireball through the pile. He blasted a three-inch hole through eleven inches of iron. ’

  
The rest of the Sons of Wayland had been impressed in the curiously offhand way of Working-class men who’d seen one of theirs do something startling. Lew Smith had later told me that a four inch test was usual for the blacksmiths who spent their lives around fire and iron, six inches was a cause for quiet satisfaction, nine inches would earn a man a drink from every son of Wayland so they could later say they’d bought the man a drink as proof of their witnessing such a feat, and the great Jude Smith, who’d lived and died three hundred years ago, had once managed thirteen inches.

  
‘That must have been an experience to remember,’ David said.

  
‘The heat of it took off Justin’s eyebrows,’ which had not been considered an exceptional occurrence in the Smithy, ‘and I felt like I’d stood inside a church bell at midday.’ I’d been shocked into magical deafness and all of reality had hummed silently around me.

  
‘Do the Germans have a tradition of magical smithing?’ Ogilvy asked me.

  
David answered him. ‘Yes, but they’re not looking just at Newtonian magic. They have been trying to reconcile the Natural and Supernatural worlds. I think they may have some unpleasant surprises up their sleeves.’

  
‘Magic is magic,’ I said. ‘Voodoo, Daoist, Scandinavian Shaman, Hindu Sage or Orcadian - Wizards are the same all over the world and they use similar power in differing ways. Your Germans are looking for something which doesn’t exist: as above, so below. Wizards have been looking for a way to link the Natural world and the Supernatural since the days of Miriam the Alchemist and with no success.’

  
‘So I’ve been told,’ David said. Somehow he managed to make the remark self-depreciating instead of dismissive of my opinion. ‘But there’s a new science which looks at the natural world in a way which might be reconcilable with magic. Quantum physics.’ He looked at me hopefully.

  
I shook my head.

  
‘Quantum Physics shows the sub-atomic natural world behaving as though it was magic - but the magic leaves no vestigia. It’s tremendously important: without the inherent magic, the whole of reality would collapse. Quantum Physics shows that magic follows mathematical rules. If the Natural world has to behave magically on a sub-atomic level, then perhaps we can work out the rules which separate the natural world from the magical.’

  
His voice was taut with passion for his studies. Listening to him, I could feel the anticipation of magical discovery and a new world of power. It was emanating from David, I realised. This expanding knowledge was pulling something loose in the world.  
‘Some rules,’ I said, ‘are best left unquestioned.’

  
‘I don’t believe in that sort of restriction,’ David said. He was utterly polite. ‘Simply by modelling the Laws of Nature, we find that magic is woven into the fabric of reality. Our power is a blunt instrument at best, and a small blunt instrument at that. What’s the highest order spell that a Wizard can command?’

  
‘Perhaps fifteenth-order for a matter of seconds, if the spell was built on extremely well-practiced forma and the Wizard had a staff,’ I said. ‘Anything beyond that would over-stretch the Wizard and he’d end up like Reginald.’ Who was almost able to eat soup unaided.

  
‘And the staff powers the spell, with the wizard as a controlling conduit,’ David said. ‘So a fireball can go through eleven inches of iron without killing the wizard who has commanded the force. But if the staff was more powerful, then would the spell be more powerful?’

  
‘That was the reason they were tested,’ I said. ‘The craft tradition does not result in factory uniformity.’

  
‘Moses parted the Sea of Reeds,’ David said. ‘Tons and tons of water, all held in place because he lifted his staff. Control of water isn’t particularly difficult but it’s extremely power-hungry. He must have been using the power inherent in the water itself.’  
‘I was always taught that God did it,’ Wheatcroft said, as though that concluded the discussion.

  
‘God could be present in all things,’ David said. ‘Like Coleridge hints in his Aeolian Harp poem, God is woven into all of nature. Quantum Physics shows us how and offers us the Promethean flame of creation.’

  
‘Is this going anywhere?’ Wheatcroft asked rudely. I would have been content to listen to David, but Wheatcroft was right - we were running out of time. Eighteen this month, eighteen the next - and there were some four thousand wizards, by Paterston’s estimation, who were of military age and could be called up to fight for King and Country.

  
‘The Germans have been researching the nature of magic,’ David said. ‘I have reason to believe that they advanced than we are. They may not have the same restrictions as we do, especially if they have moved past craft traditions. Fireballs might not be enough.’

  
His concern chilled me. I had watched the Nazis rise to power - the whole world had - and they were too confident and too belligerent. This coming war was not necessarily going to go well for us.  
‘Mellenby, perhaps we could continue this conversation later,’ I said.

  
He held my eye for just a moment too long and agreed.

  
He came to my room in the evening wearing a distinctly un-military dressing gown. His feet were bare, a bad strategy when the stone floors were only partially covered with rugs.

  
‘I know,’ he said, spotting my downward glance, ‘but we have a new housemaid and she forgot to pack my slippers. She isn’t as efficient as Molly.’

  
‘You’d better sit on my bed,’ I said. ‘Your feet must be frozen.’

  
He did, swinging his legs up so he was sitting with his legs stretched out and his ankles crossed. I sat in the wing-chair which held the odour of the horsehair it was stuffed with.

  
‘You were curious about my research,’ he commented.

  
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you know that we sat out the last war - there was an agreement between us and the Germans to limit casualties. Not everyone in the Folly thought that we had made the best decision, and I’m positive that the Germans would have the same dissent. This coming war is likely to be different.’

  
‘You’re certain that there’s going to be a war,’ he said.

  
‘They see the terms of their surrender at the end of the Great War as an act of treachery by criminals,’ I said. ‘Under Corporal Shickelgruber, they’re holding rallies and wearing uniforms and ignoring the limitations placed on their military capabilities by the Versailles treaty. We don’t know much about their magical capabilities.’

  
‘I have friends in Germany with similar research interests to mine,’ he said, ‘and lately their letters have been somewhat cryptic. I would almost say that they’re trying to get more information out of me than I’m getting from them - but we’re all researchers, all scientists, and we share our discoveries.’ He looked at me, wanting me to understand. ‘They’re good chaps,’ he said.

  
‘What is their research specialism?’ I asked.

  
‘They were looking into the different ways magic is utilised by the seelie and unseelie compared to humans,’ he said. ‘We thought that the way that power is drawn on could shed some light onto the nature of magic.’  
It made precious little sense to me. Magic was magic, just as water was water, and fire was fire. Explaining how water and fire worked on a microscopic level was of little practical use when brewing a cup of tea.

  
‘There’s going to be a war,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to end up in uniform. I want to do my bit, but I know where I’m needed - and that’s in the lab. Fireballs aren’t going to win this war.’ He looked very worried. ‘They’re ahead of me.’

  
‘But they’re good chaps,’ I needled him deliberately.

  
‘Good,’ he said, ‘is relative. A chap can excuse all sorts of poor behaviour if he convinces himself that he’s doing good for the cause, and their cause is not peace in our time. You know it and I know it.’  
‘Can you make a difference?’ I asked him directly.

  
‘I might be able to,’ he said. ‘I’m the only Wizard in the country with a degree in physics. That’s got to count for something.’  
‘And your opposite number in Germany?’

  
‘Opposite numbers,’ he said. ‘Degrees, Doctorates, and funding. Their funding has increased recently. I have a three year old boy and a wife, and I’ve been helping out old Oswald in Herefordshire as an assistant county practitioner. My studies have come a very poor third to my other responsibilities.’

  
A wife and child. I must not show my disappointment, I thought. He met my eyes and smiled as though he was reading my mind.

  
‘There’s a certain charm about a man who has such an honourable outlook,’ he said softly. ‘You’ve changed your mind about the direction this conversation was going to take. Eleanor and I are quite in agreement about our married life. She’s my best friend, nothing more. Both of us have outside interests.’

  
A code I’d heard before.

  
‘I can talk to Paterston on your behalf,’ I said. ‘He’s overseeing the Folly’s preparedness. I expect you would end up in uniform. Paterston’s quite keen on that sort of thing. He thinks it adds gravitas to the Folly.’ And to his own official standing, since he would be giving the newly be-uniformed Wizards their orders. He had recently been promoted to Major, a promotion based on his importance to the War Preparation Office instead of any inherent superiority to me. We both knew it and he was awkward in my presence.

  
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. He made no move to leave.

  
‘Is there anything else?’ I hinted.

  
He smiled again, slow and relaxed. ‘Oh, nothing important,’ he said. ‘I should probably get some rest.’ He rolled off my bed and stood. I resisted the urge to push him back onto the bed. ‘I’m not used to this military discipline. Oswald’s got me running errands, but he’s asleep for half of the day and doesn’t notice if I spend a little too long reading a journal.’

  
‘There are journals on quantum magic?’ I asked, just to draw the conversation out a little longer.

  
‘Not exactly,’ David said. ‘He has some old works on the seelie and unseelie. Molly is a curious person. I want to understand her better. Forgive me, sir - but there were rumours that you were very well acquainted with Molly when you were younger.’ He turned the comment, which could have been construed as reporting gossip to its subject, into a polite enquiry.

  
I stood as well. He looked alarmed for a moment, but something in my eyes turned his alarm into anticipation. He flicked his eyes up and down my body as I approached him and stood too close.  
‘And just how is that relevant?’ I asked him.

  
‘A seelie - or unseelie - who lives amongst us by choice, and perhaps has some affection for you, might be less secretive than her relatives,’ he said. Fishing again.  
‘Some affection,’ I repeated.

  
‘One should always be open to new experiences,’ David said, ‘and the rumour was that…’

  
‘Face down,’ I said softly, loving his stillness and the way his eyes were widening, ‘because she bit a hole the size of my fist in the pillow. I took it as a personal compliment. I do like seeing others try to do the same thing, even if his or her teeth are not up to the job.’

  
He shivered. I’d knocked his poise: he’d been too self-assured that he could handle me as he had his previous lovers. I wasn’t a University Lothario. He’d been playing with fire and I wanted him to know it.  
‘Cold getting to you?’ I asked.

  
‘Not at all, sir,’ he said.

  
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Paterston is very keen on instilling the proper discipline in his recruits, and that seems to mean getting them cold and muddy. And standing still while being inspected.’  
His dressing gown was easy to remove. He was nude underneath, with the lean body of a man who spend his days trekking around the countryside. He’d withstood the marches well in the last week, had flinched away from the gunfire, and had been flirting with me until this evening had become inevitable in his eyes.

  
‘Hands behind your back,’ I said.

  
He cupped his right hand in his left palm and deliberately relaxed his shoulders. I strolled around him, trailing my fingers over his shoulders and back, and by the time I’d reached the front he was starting to show his interest in the little game we were playing.

  
I stroked my palm over his chest, sliding upwards over his smooth skin until my left hand held his face, thumb and fingers curling into his jaw. I leaned forward and touched my lips to his. He pushed forward to try to take the kiss.  
‘Discipline,’ I reminded him. I ran my right forefinger along his collarbone, feeling warm flesh overlaid by chilled skin.

  
His pupils were wide and he was breathing in short gasps. He wanted me. That’s what I always want from a partner: lust and desire focussed on me. I wanted to feel his shivering body and see his delicious hint of trepidation after he realised that this time he had bitten off more than he could chew. I wanted David’s mind to give in to me as much as I wanted his body to.

  
He jerked against my restraining hand, whimpered, then brought himself back under control and I saw he was laughing. ‘It’s always the quiet ones you need to watch,’ he said.  
‘True enough,’ I said.

  
I shifted my hand on his face so his mouth was covered, and moved to stand behind him, pulling him back against my body and pinching his flat nipple to make him squirm. He yelped with shock. I hadn’t been gentle.  
‘Hush,’ I said, and did it again.

  
He reached back and I felt his hand rub over my groin. He was checking to see if he’d managed to get a rise out of me - he had, of course, and I felt his face move in a smile under my hand. This was a game that both of us were enjoying.  
He was slim enough that I knew I would be able to lift him and dump him on the bed when I wanted to.

  
Not that I was going to do that too soon, of course.

 

  
Present day

  
I decided that I wouldn’t need to explain everything in detail to Peter. I do wonder how much he knows about me, or how much he’s guessed. I have to remind myself sometimes that homosexual acts have been legal for the whole of his life. He wouldn’t be bothered. From the thoughtful look on his face, I guessed that he realised there had been something irregular about my relationship with David.

  
‘I know you were at Ettersburg,’ Peter said, ‘but that’s all I know about your war record.’

  
‘Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, the Eastern Front. My War was mostly with Resistance groups. I don’t think I saw the inside of an intact building for a year and half. I returned to the Folly in late ’44, and I was up to my neck in strategy meetings within the week.’

  
I disliked talking about it - a young man like Peter would see my stories as heroic derring-do, and forget that the more dramatic action was interspaced with months of preparation, long marches through dismal weather, hunger, illness and the like. Watching a comrade die of lockjaw and wondering whether I would succumb as well, hearing the gunshots of executions ordered by the Nazis because of a sabotage mission that I had led, magical assassinations and magical battles and the horror of realising that you had blown the gaff and this time you were definitely going to die for your mistake… All I could do was keep going and I didn’t feel heroic. It was a grind, and towards the end I was exhausted. I’d been on the run for weeks and my final extraction from Occupied Europe had resulted in the deaths of three of my comrades. I didn’t want anyone to call me a hero.

  
It was good to see David again. We’d continued our arrangement whenever I had been in England. The intensity of war had driven both of us into squeezing as much out of each other as we could. He was always a delight to me. Persuading him to talk about some abstruse scientific discoveries then making him lose his concentration was endlessly amusing. His body and teeth-clenching reactions to my touch was an absorbing distraction to my less pleasant thoughts, and when I woke in the night, disoriented because I was in a bed, his calming voice was an anchor to reality and chased away the nightmares.

  
I had met his wife, Eleanor, a few months after I first met David. It was disconcertingly like meeting family in that I knew I had no choice but to get on well with them. I found that firstly, she was almost my age, and secondly, her dear friend Penelope was as well. Eleanor was the niece of Oswald Extremely Senior, the antiquated Hereford County Practitioner, and was his live-in Female Relative, a perfectly respectable and understandable job title in those days. Penelope had lived with them for nearly twenty years. She ran a small business as a beekeeper and bred hounds.

  
David and Eleanor’s marriage was one of convenience as well as mutual friendship: Eleanor could have the child she wanted without provoking any more gossip than she and Penelope already attracted, and David could have financial security and could help Oswald out when any County Practitioner duties interfered with his afternoon nap. Oswald Extremely Senior’s grand-nephew, Hugh, went to live with them and learn magic after it became clear that Casterbridge would not re-open after the summer holidays of ‘39. They took gleeful pleasure in each others’ company, expected me to join in with their family life, and the time I spent with them was wonderful. They were my refuge.

  
The War destroyed our family as it did to so many families. Penelope was called up for War work and died in the Blitz. Oswald Extremely Senior took his revenge in the only way he could - he wore himself out through teaching Hugh combat magic and died as well.

  
I do wonder sometimes what would have happened if we had all lived.

  
My return to London was not without difficulties. It was impossibe for me to return to Naziland: I was too notorious, making my capture inevitable, and knew too much about Resistance activities across the whole continent. The shadowy figure of a sinister Nazi declaiming ‘ve have vays of making you tock’ was not a joke in 1944.

  
Paterston hadn’t liked my entrance into the world of planning. His position as Master at Arms of the Folly was by default: there were precious few Wizards with military experience. The Master of the Folly was in his sixties and struggled to keep up with modern warfare. I added field experience in Occupied Europe to the War Office conferences and Paterston became irritated that I had been ordered to assist in planning the counter-invasion. Every avenue of Intelligence had to be explored - even ones which were highly irregular.

 

1944

  
‘It’s a suicide mission,’ I said. ‘We can’t ask any more men to die.’

  
‘Might I remind you, Captain Nightingale, Private Mellenby, that there is a War on?’ Major Paterston said mildly. ‘An SOE operative dropped into the Occupied Territories has a life expectancy of six weeks. We’re doing everything we can to win this war, and sacrifices must be made.’

  
‘She killed the three men that tried haemomancy within twenty minutes,’ I argued. ‘There is no chance of survival. An SOE operative could still get lucky and live.’ It was cruel to subject Molly to these magical espionage experiments. She was inconsolable after each death she caused.

  
‘The four,’ David corrected me. He looked exhausted.

  
The last four? As far as I knew, she’d only tried it three times.

  
‘Roberts - little chap, must have been seventy if he was a day, bandy legs and grey hair,’ Paterston said. ‘Last night.’

  
So that was where David had been. I had assumed that he was on magical bomb disposal duty and fallen asleep without him.

  
Roberts had been working for the disastrous accelerated magical training school after he had been excused active service, and had been at a loose end ever since it closed. He’d been frustrated that his age had barred him from serving King and Country, and had looked at our uniforms with barely disguised envy. He’d earned himself a spot on the roll of honour in the only way he could.

  
‘You’re killing Wizards to get information that a spy could pass on,’ I said. Wizards were not a protected class of citizen - I knew that all too well - but we were limited in number and, like any finite resource in wartime, shouldn’t be wasted.

  
‘Roberts volunteered. He died in comfort, which is more than a spy caught by the Nazis could expect. And mundane spies aren’t getting us the information that we need.’ David’s voice was calm but I could tell that he was miserable. His magpie mind had thought of Molly’s gift for haemomancy, discovered by accident during the Great War, and unfolded a plan to use it as a way of gleaning information unobtainable by other means.

  
‘Haemomancy is too vague to be useful,’ I said flatly. I’d read the notes that David had taken during his experiments. They described the ramblings of a man recounting his dreams while he was coming round from anaesthesia.

  
‘Roberts got some useful information out before he died. He was listening to the Fuhrer in private conversation with Goebbels,’ David said. ‘I think I know what went wrong: the distance is simply too great. Even travel through the world of ghosts takes time, and time is life-blood. We have a new protocol - an aeroplane flying overhead with Molly inside it.’ Along with her victim and David.

  
‘She dislikes leaving the Folly,’ I continued my argument in a different direction. ‘Forcing her into an aeroplane is likely to upset her so much that she might lose control and kill more than her intended spy…’

  
‘She’s not likely to kill you,’ Paterston said to me. ‘And therefore not likely to risk the aircraft.’

  
‘No - Captain Nightingale is too valuable an officer to risk on a mission like this,’ David said immediately.

  
Paterston looked at me, his eyes impassive. He might as well have been asking me to join a shooting party at the Folly’s country estate. ‘You cannot return to Occupied Europe, Captain Nightingale, as your description has been too widely circulated. Your capture would result in too much information being passed to the enemy. Ettersburg is extremely well-defended, and only a few Wizards stand a chance of breaching the defences. Your insights into the Ettersburg problem would be of sterling value to us.’  
‘I understand your point of view, Sir,’ I disagreed with him. I would, though, since it was my life and incipient death which he was arguing for. No skill, luck or nerve would see me out of this dilemma.

  
‘We are trying to minimise casualties for the forthcoming assault on Ettersburg, but without Intelligence we will be going in blind. We need to know what’s in that castle, the castle is too well defended to allow standard espionage, we have a … “being” who can bypass the normal and supernatural defences with assistance from a Wizard, and we have reason to believe that her self-control around you is likely to be better than it would be for, say, Private David Mellenby.’

  
He was referring, of course, to the rumour that I had bedded Molly. And the utter bastard had picked up on the other rumour about me - that I was currently bedding David. Both happened to be true, but no gentleman would use rumour and gossip to manipulate another like that. Major Paterston, Master of Arms at the Folly, had taken to the underhand tactics of irregular warfare like a duck to water.

  
I looked at David. He was pale with shock that Paterston had made the threat against his own life. He knew what a haemomancy death looked like. I’d only comforted David after each death and heard scanty details from him.  
‘When?’ I asked. I’d managed to keep my voice crisp and my face impassive.

  
‘Three days,’ Paterston said. ‘I would surmise that Molly will still be ... sated... and so less likely to overdo matters. We won’t inform Molly in advance. She’ll fret unnecessarily. I’m sure you’ll both be fine. Dismissed.’

  
I preceded David out of Paterston’s office, and he followed me up to my room.

  
‘Thomas, I didn’t know Paterston would suggest you should go,’ he said. He was pacing, his hands jammed in his uniform jacket pockets and his voice was jerky. He was shocked beyond guilt, horrified that his experiments were going to result in my death. ‘We do need the Intelligence, that’s why I developed the new protocol - it should give the Wizard a longer window in the field. But I didn’t know he’d think you were the best man for the job.’

  
‘I have over twenty years of active service, David, as well as my other qualifications. Who else could inspect the defences of Ettersburg?’ I asked him.

  
‘Thomas, please don’t go. Find some excuse, shoot yourself in the foot, desert - please don’t make me watch you die.’

  
‘It would be a suicide mission for whoever replaced me,’ I said. ‘That would be you. You’re fifteen years younger than me, you didn’t become a soldier voluntarily, and you’ve got a wife and child. You’re asking too much, David. In three days, one or the other of us is going to bleed out, and the order was given to me. Take care of Molly for me.’

  
Three days. The room seemed brighter, the linenfold wood panels on the wall were achingly beautiful, and David’s body called to me. Not everyone had three days’ warning of his death. I was lucky. I had time to put my affairs in order. I grabbed his belt buckle and pulled him against me. I could taste the salt of his tears as I kissed him, and feel his hands shaking as he held the nape of my neck. He wasn’t a soldier. He was simply wearing the uniform of one.

 

1944

  
It had taken three powerful Wizards - the Master of the Folly, the Master at Arms, and me - to remove Molly from the Folly. She’d put tendrils of her own peculiar power into the fabric of the building and those tendrils bound her. Finally, after over half a century of polish had oozed out of the woodwork, she was bundled into a car and we set off into the dusk of my last day of life.

  
The aeroplane was scheduled to take off from Biggin Hill in two hours. We were running late because of Molly’s reluctance to leave, and our driver sped through London streets. I stopped myself from hoping that she’d crash and the whole bloody mission would be called off. I’d spent my last three days on earth in the most debauched fashion I could. I was going to leave two sorely used bodies behind: mine and David’s. Doing all of it again after the mission was rescheduled would be exhausting. I was, after all, forty-four. I’d had a good innings and I’d done my best to make it memorable.

  
The aeroplane was a bomber, a big lumbering thing which had been adapted to provide space for Molly, David, and the unfortunate Wizard who was going to provide the haeomomantic commentary in a space next to the bomb-bay doors. The pilot was an experienced one, the gunners were cheery and Molly was weeping already. David had found that cutting the Wizard’s neck to release a fountain of blood could entice her into feeding, and she knew she would have no choice in the matter. He had a sharp knife and a suture kit and I knew that he had a body bag hidden somewhere out of my sight. Maybe it was in the crate marked with a red cross.

  
Molly sat with her face buried in her hands. Nothing that any of the crew said elicited a response from her. I wondered if they knew what we were about to do, and decided that they must. The mission was too strange.

  
‘Two minutes to target range,’ the pilot said. The bomb bay doors rattled open, letting thin cold air into the aeroplane. I tried to look down, saw rushing thin clouds, and David cut my throat. That had been the signal, I realised. I turned and instinctively tried to clap my hand to the wound, but Molly was already on me. Her lips hid too-long piranha-like teeth which gripped my flesh. I felt my blood flowing into her mouth and heard her gulp.

  
I tried to pull back from her, and we both tumbled onto the metal hull, and then I was falling out of the aeroplane and through the black sky. The air was full of ghosts. Our boys, theirs, looking for arms and legs and guts which had been sprayed into the sky. Startled faces, sternly not-crying faces, the ghost of a parachute canopy and the last terrified scream as the silk burned in an explosion of flak. I looked down and saw the castle. It had a pulsating glow which I saw, as I drew closer, was because of the myriad of ghosts surrounding it.

  
They weren’t human. They were the Other, fae and the like. Did that mean they could see me? I touched my wispy feet onto the grass. I drew a few curious glances, but they weren’t terribly interested in me. They were looking to the children, their children. Pointy-chinned and cat-like eyes, and they couldn’t understand what had happened, and they were crying. It doesn’t end here, I heard the ghosts whisper. They’ve stolen your life from you but we’re waiting for them. We’ll have our revenge.  
They were drawing back to create a path leading to the Castle. He walks among us now. He’ll bring an end to their mortal lives and we’ll seize their ghosts. Don’t get in his way. And a liquid trill like a nightingale singing in the night followed me as I left them.

  
‘There’s woodland,’ my mortal throat said. It hurt to talk. ‘It comes close to the walls. But they cut it down. There’s not enough space to land planes - gliders could work better. Wizards in gliders, controlling the wind. We could soar like birds.’  
‘Good,’ David’s warm voice said. ‘Look inside.’

  
I slipped past guards and guardhouses and magical defences into the castle.

  
It looked like an infirmary. Screaming sharp pain of knife and flesh, choking and panic and fear, and it wasn’t a place where people came to get better. It was a place they came to die. Cages and cells, all full of terrified souls.  
But these men, the ones walking around, weren’t terrified. They were talking in German and had clipboards and were looking at something through a thick magical warding.

  
‘He’s still alive.’

  
‘Still? Interesting, the Jew subjects died after a day and a half, and he’s been in there for nearly a week…’

  
I looked over their shoulders. The warding covered the top of a pit-like chamber.

  
The subject of their conversation looked at me. Another fae, this one an adult male. Something had happened to him, something awful. He’d been left in the pit with a vampire, and I could see the vampire as a black hole and a human shaped body at the same time. The fae man’s life force was trickling away from him to feed the vampire. He looked up at me - definitely at me, because he smiled - and made a magic-laden gesture towards the vampire. The vampire made a contented sound and I saw that the trickle of life-force had changed to a glutting flood. The fae had distracted the vampire so that it didn’t try to take any of my tenuously held life force.

  
‘Tell me how I can save you,’ I said.

  
‘You can’t save anyone here,’ he whispered. ‘We’re all doomed. Be merciful and end it quickly so we don’t suffer any more.’

 

  
I looked over the wardings. A cage based on iron, magnets, and a spell that spread the essence of the iron over the entrance to the pit. It was easy to break even in my incorporeal state. Human magic, Newtonian magic, is not prevented by human-wrought material. I tumbled into the pit and the vampire shrank away from me. She is with you, he whined. Take her away from me.

  
I held my hand out to the fae man as he lay on the ground. His ghost stretched upwards like a reluctant cat which was being picked up but wanted to stay in contact with the ground. He was dragging himself away from the vampire. I put some effort into helping him up and heard David’s voice calling me from a great distance.

  
‘Thomas, Thomas - what’s going on?’

  
‘He died,’ I said. ‘They put him in a room with a vampire to see how long it would take for him to die. He was fae. They don’t die easily.’

  
‘I died,’ the fae said to me. He seemed relieved by the fact. He looked up, still holding my hand, and we were out of the pit.

 

  
‘What did he say?’ the first speaker asked. He was wearing a white coat, the same sort of coat that I had seen David wear to keep splashes of chemicals off his clothes. He was a scientist. Brown fogs of studious thought tumbled around his head.

  
‘Vampires,’ David said. ‘They have vampires in there.’

  
‘They’re researching,’ I said, and the pain in my neck had spread through my mortal body.

  
‘Researching what?’ David asked. His voice was loud and blaring in my mortal ears. My head hurt as though I’d drunk a whole bottle of muscadet wine.

  
‘What are they doing here?’ I asked the new ghost.

  
‘I’ll show you.’ He took my wisp-arm and we slid through stone and brick and cages, and into a room piled high with papers. With his help, I wasn’t stopped by walls and with my help, he wasn’t stopped by iron. ‘This. They create knowledge as they destroy us.’

  
‘Why?’

  
And we slid downward again, and I saw what they had done with their knowledge. Fae were Seelie, but they lived as we humans lived. And then there were the sinister things which prowled through the world, and the Nazis had chosen to turn them into the dogs of war.

 

Present day

  
‘But you didn’t die,’ Peter said, just as Laurent had done when I had told him the tale.

  
I touched the fading scar on my neck where David had inexpertly stitched me up. ‘David gave me a blood transfusion. It wasn’t my blood, it was somehow not alive and it definitely had no magic, and using it nearly killed Molly. He knew I’d never agree to it so he didn’t tell me what he’d planned to do.’

 

1944  
‘Glad to see you made it, Thomas,’ Paterston said. He was standing at the end of my bed. I didn’t make any attempt to sit up.

  
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said.

  
‘And, before you ask, Molly’s doing just fine. Mrs Mibb says she got up this morning and helped with the breakfast service.’

  
‘Glad to hear it, sir.’

  
‘We’ve all decided to give her our meat-rations for the week to help her recover - you’re excepted, of course, since you’re in need of feeding up.’

  
‘A noble sacrifice, sir,’ I said.

  
‘Yes, well,’ Paterston said. ‘I can’t say that I’m fond of Mrs Mibb’s sister’s pickled eggs, but needs must, eh? We’re holding a planning meeting in the War Office tomorrow. Eleven in the morning. You’ll be there.’  
‘Yes, sir.’

  
I waited until he had left the room before I tried to get out of bed. I wasn’t sure I could do it. I have my pride, and being put back into bed by Paterston after I had fallen to the floor was beneath me. I would rather wait until David came up from his lab to help me. So that’s what I did.

 

1962  
‘Did Molly ever forgive my father?’ Laurent asked.

  
‘She has barely forgiven me,’ I answered, ‘and it’s been nearly twenty years.’

  
She hadn’t had enough time to forgive David before the shotgun had created a mess in the laboratory, and Molly never did take to people who created a mess.

 

1944, November

  
‘Bomb it from altitude,’ I said. ‘It’s the only way to be sure.’

  
‘Captain Nightingale, I’m sure you appreciate that there is more at stake here than the lives of a few fae.’ Paterston was pacing along the length of the table. I wished I could stand and face him, force him to look away from my eyes and concede defeat. But I was confined to a wheelchair. I had requisitioned nineteen-year-old Hugh Oswald as a wheelchair-driver. He had arrived from Herefordshire a couple of weeks ago, having only just completed his apprenticeship and military training and was eager to join the War effort. He stood behind me trying to maintain his ‘parade rest’ stance and not shuffle from foot to foot.

  
‘The Post-War world is going to be different to the one you and I grew up in. The Folly’s place has to be assured - and this research mustn’t fall into the hands of the Russians,’ Paterston lectured me.  
‘All the more reason to bomb it into oblivion,’ I said.

  
‘What about the prisoners?’ David asked me. ‘We can save some of them, can’t we?’

  
‘We can’t risk it,’ I said. ‘They’re mixed up with the Unseelie. Ettersburg is still behind enemy lines and it would take too long to separate them. The prisoner I spoke to knew that they’d been given a death sentence. We would simply be delivering the coup de grace.’

  
‘We won’t be destroying Ettersburg,’ Colonel Williams said. It was the end of that discussion as far as he was concerned. ‘The research is too valuable to us - it can’t be replicated. We must have those papers.’

  
‘The attack is scheduled for January next year,’ Paterston said. ‘That gives us enough time to muster as many Wizards as we can. I believe you have some connection with the Sons of Wayland, Captain?’

  
I agreed that I did, and waited.

  
‘They have been excused active service and listed as a reserved occupation,’ Paterston continued. ‘I believe now is the time to draw on all of our reserves.’

  
He waited again. He wanted me to say that I would visit them and break the news. The truth was, I wasn’t fit enough to tie my own bootlaces.

  
‘Private Oswald?’ Paterston said eventually.

  
‘Sir?’ Hugh said in reply.

  
‘Ask my secretary to issue you with a travel warrant for Manchester once we return to the Folly.’

  
‘Yes, sir,’ Hugh said. He was brimming with bounce and eagerness.

  
‘I’ll lead the attacking force,’ Paterston said. ‘Captain Nightingale will be in charge of the rearguard.’

  
‘Is that the best use of resources?’ Colonel Wright asked. ‘I understand Captain Nightingale has some understanding of the layout of the castle. Wouldn’t it be better to reverse your positions?’

  
Paterston disagreed with him, repeatedly. I had a sinking feeling that Paterson wanted the glory which would come from a successful attack. The rearguard would only see limited action, according to Paterston’s plans.

  
‘There are booby-traps,’ I said. ‘Demon traps and the like.’

  
‘Mellenby has made a specialty out of disarming the demon traps which have been dropped in London,’ Paterson said to Colonel Wright. ‘He’ll join the attacking forces.’

  
I felt my heart freeze. ‘Mellenby has no field experience,’ I disagreed with Paterston again. ‘This isn’t going to be a cake-run. He’s a scholar, not an active soldier…’

  
‘He’ll do his duty,’ Pasterson snapped at me, ‘and I’ll thank you, Captain Nightingale, not to try to sabotage this mission any further. We’re going in, and that’s an order.’

 

Present day

  
‘What went wrong?’ Peter asked me. Laurent had asked the same question, of course, but Laurent was a Military officer and Peter was a policeman. Laurent could understand the reality of a battle and how tactical plans could all fall apart within minutes.  
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Battle is ninety percent waiting and ten percent terror. We came in on gliders and Paterston at the head of the attacking force blew his way straight in to the castle. The guards didn’t seem to know what to do.’  
‘Ghosts,’ Peter said, meaning that the waiting ghosts had befuddled them.

  
‘Probably,’ I said. ‘But once we - they - were inside, our lot were simply unprepared for what was waiting for them. David told me that half of them simply died on the spot. Paterston should have called the retreat then and there but he didn’t. He kept pushing onwards, and then he over-reached himself.’

  
‘Hyperthaumaturgical degradation?’ Peter asked.

  
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Not bad enough to kill him. He seemed to forget where he was, according to David. They had prepared levitating crates to shift the Black Library and David simply bundled Paterston into one of the crates and sent him out.’  
‘Hugh Oswald said you were injured,’ Peter prompted.

  
‘I was shot,’ I shrugged. ‘I ordered the gliders to leave and led the stragglers back to Allied lines. It was only when I returned to the Folly that I realised what had happened.’

  
So many dead, too many. The Folly had been emptied of life. The bedrooms were empty, meals were served to empty seats, and the coach-house had one lone nineteen year old Wizard waiting for his comrades to return.

 

1962

  
‘So Paterston caused the catastrophe,’ Laurent said.

  
‘He did,’ I agreed grimly. ‘I was furious with him. It was up to me to take up where he had left off as the senior Military officer at the Folly and I didn’t want to do it.’

  
I was forty-five, and I had spent nearly a quarter of a century in service to the Country. It was such hard work. Maybe I would have taken up one of the empty County Practitioner positions eventually, or become the Geography Master at Casterbridge and hidden my inability to spell the lengthier words by rubbing my arm where I had been shot and telling a boy that he was my blackboard scribe, but in ’45 I simply wanted to rest. But I couldn’t.

  
It was only after the War that I realised the scope of Paterston’s plans. He’d wanted the Folly to be far more important in the post-war world. Before the war, we’d been meddlers in what Marx labelled the State apparatus - the Police, the Military, Parliament and the Law-courts, the upper-class world of gentlemen’s clubs and agreements. Paterston had thought big. He’d wanted research into Magical science and a second school focussed on technology and above all he’d wanted Folly Wizards to be given their proper respect. All of them, of course, would be reporting back to him, making him the most respectable of all. I had no interest in any of that but it all had to be seen to, and his agreements either upheld or dismantled.

  
His plans were worthless now that there were simply too few wizards to fill all of the necessary posts, let alone the unnecessary ones. The Folly had exhausted all of the old Wizarding families’ patience. They had demanded that we tell them why their sons and fathers and brothers had died, and we had no answer for them. The few Wizards that were left held a deep anger towards the Folly, and by extension, me. The reason we had attacked the place had become clear to them - a raid to collect papers which detailed torture. Why would the Folly want such things? Was it because they wanted to harness the same power as the Nazis? They broke their staffs, all of them, declaring that they were not Wizards any longer since being a Wizard had led to Ettersburg.  
I was angry too, of course, but I had no-one to be angry towards. Paterston was too forgetful to understand any anger.

  
It was hard, those first few years after the war. I was over-stretched, the few elderly wizards left in the Folly were next to useless in the new world of science and the end of the Empire, and it seemed like every day brought more problems.  
Paterston spent his days happily bumbling around the Folly. He would carefully eke out his rations, saving a square of chocolate for later or surreptitiously scraping an extra serving of butter from what he believed was my share. Molly took over all of the housekeeping duties so that Mrs Mibb could make sure he didn’t get lost in the cellars or go wandering off into London. She was getting old, but so was he. So was I. I felt as though my life had turned into an unending stream of onerous tasks. Nothing gave me pleasure.

  
‘And my father?’ Laurent asked.

  
‘We still needed to know what the Nazis had been researching in Ettersburg,’ I said. ‘He divided his time between you and your mother, and his Lab in the Folly.’

  
David and I were no longer sleeping together. We’d argued - I was always tired, he wasn’t sorting out the Black Library to my schedule, and there seemed to be little point in trying to patch things up. I couldn’t see the point in doing anything at all: only habit was making me fulfil my duties. I was forcing myself through the motions of living. David was just one more problem to me.

  
‘He didn’t want to do it,’ Laurent said, startling me. I had thought that David had not shown how desperate he was to anyone. I had no idea that things were getting so bad until it was too late.

 

1948

  
I blew the lock out of the door and the smell of blood and brains and cordite was thick in the air. I could see a foot shod in a polished Army boot under blue-grey corduroy trousers. Someone had sat on a lab stool and a twelve-bore shotgun had been fired at his head. He’d fallen sideways after the gun had blown his head away. I stumbled into the fug of death and saw grey and red and white matter was sprayed over the knitted striped jumper which David’s mother had made him. The corpse was wearing David’s clothes.

  
I touched the trigger of the shotgun and felt David’s signare slipping away. A narrow and well-controlled impello. David must have used magic on the gun to make it fire. A shotgun isn’t terribly convenient for close-quarter work: the barrel is too long, and the way that the shotgun had fallen showed me that it had been braced against the bench to avoid the kick throwing the muzzle away from its target. David must not have been able to reach the trigger.

  
I stood. ‘We need to find David,’ I said. ‘Someone has stolen his clothes, dressed this man as David and then forced David to use impello to fire the gun and kill him. David’s been kidnapped.’

  
Paterston and the Master of the Folly, an old man called Victor Molesworth, weren’t doing anything. They were standing and looking at me and not doing anything. The defences of the Folly were Molesworth’s responsibility - he should be checking them. David would have tried to hook a labyrinth-line spell into the defences as he was dragged out. Paterston should be on the telephone, letting the Home Office know that David, the only man who could interpret the results from Ettersburg, was missing.  
‘Why are you still standing there gawping at me?’ My voice cracked out like a Sergeant’s. ‘Paterston - David Mellenby has been kidnapped. Call the Home Office and tell them that we need Police assistance. Victor - check the defences.’

  
Paterston burst into tears. I had forgotten that he wasn’t in charge of that sort of thing any longer. I was.

  
‘Thomas,’ Victor said, and his voice was too choked. He was going to start weeping as well. He had a job to do, we all had a job to do, and there wasn’t time to mourn the loss of one man. Not when another was in danger and every moment wasted was time we needed to use to find him.

  
‘The defences,’ I snapped at him. ‘Step to it, man.’

  
‘The defences are intact,’ Victor said, ‘and David hasn’t been kidnapped.’

  
‘Where is he, then?’ I asked. I could feel my face was white and I was starting to shake. I must be furious, I thought. I had to put my feelings aside: David was relying on me to save him and anger was not the solution.  
‘Right here in this room,’ Victor said, and gestured towards the corpse.

  
‘That’s not David,’ I pointed out. Why were they being so obtuse? ‘David is alive - I saw him this morning.’ He’d been wearing that ridiculous striped jumper that his mother had knitted for him and his Army boots. He found them more comfortable for Lab work since he had to spend a lot of time standing.

  
Victor walked around the corpse, skirting the splashes, and picked up an envelope. Now my attention had been drawn away from the corpse in David’s clothing, I could see there were three envelopes waiting on the mahogany bench.  
‘This one is addressed to you,’ he said. He seemed subdued. ‘Perhaps you should read it then we’ll discuss our response.’

  
He took it out of the laboratory and I had no choice but to follow him to the atrium. They were being absurd, insisting that we waste time like this; but I knew from experience that once a man has become fixated on an idea that it’s nearly impossible to dislodge it. I’d have to go along with their charade until it became clear to them that David was gone.

  
I don’t fully remember what happened next. I think I read the letter, I must have done, because I can still recite the contents. David hadn’t wanted to continue the research that he’d done during the War. He’d come to see it in a different light since his reading of the Black Library. He thought that even using the knowledge that we’d gained in the Ettersburg assault was wrong.

  
The results of their experiments were inconclusive, he’d written. Their experimental protocols were based on the twisted science of the Nazis. Critiquing the methodology would result in pressure to reproduce the experiments with a better protocol, and he didn’t want to have a hand in that. Not even indirectly by summarising their findings and explaining why their interpretations were of limited use. Knowledge was a great temptation to a certain sort of mind. He should know: he had that sort of mind. And the way he’d behaved during the war was bothering him. He’d prioritised the wrong things. It had seemed important at the time to win, but now he didn’t know what we had won. He didn’t know what we had fought for. He was dying for an ideal, now, he wanted a world without magical power concentrated in the hands of men who might misuse it. Knowledge is power, and his knowledge was too powerful.

  
He was sorry, but this was the only solution he could think of. An end to the thoughts that whispered to him of experiments, of discovering more about the nature of magic, and which promised him the cold remote power of a god. He wanted to die as a man.

  
He loved me, and he loved his wife and he loved his child. He wished he could see another way out, but it had been nearly four years since Ettersburg and he was under increasing pressure to explain his findings.  
I knew he was. I’d asked him just this morning about when we could expect to see some reports on the contents of the Black Library.

  
I think Victor was the one to send me into a magical sleep, and when I woke, it was as a patient and Hugh Oswald was in the bed next to mine. I would stay in the hospital for nearly three years. The first year was a blur of fury and exhaustion, but I do know that nobody from the Folly visited, not even once.

 

Present Day

  
‘They might have thought it best that they didn’t,’ Peter said.

  
I shrugged. ‘Possibly. I was angry with them all - more angry than I thought it possible to be with another human being. Hugh was good at calming me.’

  
Poor Hugh. He tried not to show it, but my rages terrified him. Then again, everything terrified him: butterflies trapped in the greenhouses, a vixen calling in the night, the realisation that one of the nursing staff was fae and his singing was too calming to be entirely natural. I had to bring myself under control because upsetting him was such an awful thing to do. Peter’s account of a doddery old man living in peace with a Female Relative was strangely comforting: he was happily falling asleep just like Oswald Extremely Senior had done, something I had thought Hugh would never do again. Something I still have difficulty with myself.

 

1951

  
‘I can’t do that,’ I said. I wasn’t in any shape to become Master of the Folly. The Hospital liked to remind its patients that we were ill, and I’d spent the last three years in pyjamas, being put into bed for an afternoon nap, and generally having what was called a rest-cure. Lots of rest, bed-rest, sitting on the verandah and having a rest, restfully walking around the garden then having a rest… I was flabby, in short, mentally and physically.

  
Hugh Oswald had written to me eighteen months ago after he broke his staff and said that I was welcome to live with him and his new wife, and I had written back, with the assistance of one of the nurses, to say that I would be joining them in a year or so once my magic-ridden nightmares had faded and I no longer woke to find the fae nurse desperately casting counter-spells. They had hinted that my rather grand pension from The Folly would come in handy, what with Hugh being unable to work. I was willing to hand the whole lot over to young Mrs Oswald if I could become Nightingale Reasonably Senior at the age of fifty-one. I had done my duty and I was going to spend my last twenty or thirty years in peace, disturbed only by Hugh’s children. I was looking forward to it. I would learn to cook in a kitchen instead of on a campfire, I would help Hugh with his bee-keeping, I would fish and keep chickens and enter vegetable-growing competitions and seduce Policemen and it was all over for me.

  
‘There’s no-one else, sir,’ Mrs Mibb said. ‘I’ve been helping Mr Molesworth with his correspondence for the last couple of years, what with his eyesight fading, and it’s all been wizards’ mums or grand-daughters writing to say that they’ve died or broken their staff, and they don’t want nothing to do with the Folly no more.’

  
I recalled Hugh’s decision to break his staff. He’d been thinking about it for weeks before making the decision. Magic, to him, meant coming under the control of the Folly again. Magic, for Hugh and the hundreds like him, was not worth the betrayal that had happened at Ettersburg.

  
‘I don’t want to do it,’ I clarified.

  
Mrs Mibb’s fingers twisted in her lap. ‘I dunno what’s going to happen, then,’ she said. ‘I’m seventy-three, sir, I’m going to move to Eastbourne with my sister once the funeral’s taken place.’

  
‘Molly can be the Housekeeper,’ I said. ‘She’s been there since the late nineteenth century so I’m sure she’ll manage.’

  
‘That’s not what I mean, sir - there is no-one else to be Master. The last few gentlemen in the Folly is all older than me, Sir. Mr Paterston isn’t in a state to be left by himself, and Molly isn’t the nursing type. He’d have to come here. She can’t be a housekeeper in an empty house, and that's what it'll be within a few years. The Home Office would sell the place off, sir, and poor dear Molly’s not likely to be understood by a new owner.’

  
‘There must be a few wizards still practicing,’ I said.

  
‘Mr Molesworth put together a list, sir,’ she said, and handed me a very small piece of paper.

  
Seawoll, Yorkshire County Practitioner. Not only was he from Yorkshire and therefore reluctant to leave for the inferior pleasures of London, he was also seventy-six and so the same problem was likely to emerge within a decade or so. I had never met him, but Oswald Extremely Senior had said that he gloried in using the most obscure dialect words in the Yorkshireman’s arsenal. Not the sort of man who could deal with the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office without causing unnecessary rancour.  
Ian McAllister, aged forty-three, currently inhabiting a croft in the Outer Hebrides. He hadn’t broken his staff, but Victor had noted through his amanuensis that this was possibly because he needed it to use as a shepherd’s crook. His response to the news that Victor had died was a note asking for the Folly’s copies of Magical Cures for Sheep Diseases and How to Cook Puffins Magically So They Nearly Taste Like Chicken.

  
Baden Smith, last of the Sons of Wayland, aged sixty-nine. He’d insisted on coming to Ettersburg and had lost both hands to a magical landmine which had a mundane charge of gunpowder attached to it. His magic was only used for telekinesis now.

  
Inigo Philberts, aged twenty-six. He hadn’t been at Ettersburg because he’d been a Japanese Prisoner of War. He was one of the young wizards who had learnt his magic from a relative after teh School closed. The relative had been a hedge-wizard, and not a terribly good one at that. Inigo might have been a promising wizard when he was fourteen but now he wasn’t and his bad form had set in place. It was too late for him to learn classical magicianship, and becoming Master of the Folly was beyond him.

  
Thomas Nightingale, aged fifty-one. Currently residing at Saint Mungo’s Asylum for the Magically Insane.

  
There were eighteen names on the list in total out of a pre-war body of over eight thousand if one included all of the apprentices. All of them, including me, were utterly unsuited to the position of Master of the Folly.

  
‘The ones who are aware of the Problem, sir, indicated that they thought you should be the next Master.’

  
‘How many of them?’ I asked.

  
‘Ten, sir. Five of them still live in the Folly, but they’re getting on in years.’

  
Master by popular acclaim, I thought. No-one could dispute my position if I did take it up.

 

  
‘Mr Wheatcroft came to visit,’ Mrs Mibb said. ‘He broke his staff two years ago, but he seemed to think that this was just a formality which could be overlooked. He wants to be Master.’

  
Wheatcroft…’Geoffrey Wheatcroft?’ I asked.

  
‘That’s him, sir.’

  
He had been stationed in Liverpool during the war to protect the docks and reinforce magical mine wardings on the merchant shipping. The work was exhausting but required no remarkable skill. It was a front-line posting like anyone else’s, given the scale of the bombing and his risk of magical brain-damage, and one which was important enough to leave him out of the Ettersburg attack. Having given the man his due, I have to admit I disliked him. He’d been angling for a position as Paterston’s right hand man from the moment the War broke out. He’d been insufferably rude to the Folly staff when he was in London. He was the sort of man who liked to be admired and thought that his status as a Wizard should be enough to ensure grovelling obedience from Molly and Mrs Mibb.

  
‘And there’s the paperwork, sir,’ Mrs Mibb said carefully. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what was in it that was so important, but we’ve had four American Wizards try to get past me and Molly in the last fortnight to have a look at it. Molly had to get quite firm with the last gentleman.’

  
The paperwork. The Black Library, the results of the Nazi investigations into unseelie life and magical weaponry. The Americans who had joined us for the attack on Ettersburg had seemed to think that the spoils should be shared. They’d been a little too interested in the practical applications discovered by the Nazis. I understood their reasoning - I’d been in a committee meeting when the suggestion was made that the Western Allies joined forces with the remnants of the Nazis so we could chase the Red Army back to Moscow. The Americans were anticipating another war already and they wanted all of the weapons they could muster.

  
I couldn’t let the Black Library fall under the guardianship of Geoffrey Wheatcroft. He didn’t even know of its existence but I could guess that once he’d had the chance to assess it he’d be lording it over the Americans and dishing out snippets of information with a condescending smile. They can’t manage without me, y’know, would be his proud boast. Americans might not naturally be the best at toadying but they’d learn how to deal with Wheatcroft within months.

  
I was dealing with the problem, I thought. I was thinking through the issue and understanding the problems. It was quite an achievement for a chap who, once it became clear that a rest was going to happen whether he liked it or not, had lost his tenuous grip on his marbles. I was getting better. It was time for me to take up my staff again and do my duty.

 

1963

  
‘It was all Paterston’s fault,’ Laurent said.

  
‘Not all of it,’ I said. ‘Some Wizards agreed with him - the Folly should be more important than it was. And he doesn’t understand, now, anyway. He’s not the man he once was.’

  
He’d been a victim of his own ambition as much as anyone. He had nowhere to go, no relatives who would care for him, no-one ever visited him. He bumbled about the Folly, exclaiming with glee when he found a chocolate bar in a drawer and forgetting that it had been secreted there by him an hour or two earlier. Laurent had been kind to him when he first came to live in the Folly, but after he had heard about Ettersburg, the kindness stopped. He grew to resent Paterston, to be impatient with him and Pasterson started to avoid being in a room with Laurent. I thought little of it at the time: I could not think that David’s son was cruel. I wonder now how long it took Paterston to learn to avoid Laurent.

  
Laurent studied hard, reading books from the Folly Library which I was unfamiliar with. Reading was never one of my chief pleasures: it takes a great deal out of me because the words slide around on the page. Standard magic was so much easier to learn because the forma were demonstrated. If I had put in more effort with reports and the like, perhaps I would have been able to stop Paterston from becoming the Master-at-Arms by doing the job myself. So it wasn’t all Paterston’s fault. It was mine as well.

 

Present day

  
‘Do you know what dyslexia is?’ Peter asked.

  
‘An excuse to explain an inability to read and write,’ I said.

  
‘Not quite right,’ he said. ‘It’s just what you’ve described. Words sliding around on the page. Some sort of problem with your eyes or something. Blaming yourself for being lazy with paperwork is like blaming a deaf person for not hearing. Is that why there was so much paperwork when I joined?’

 

  
‘I can read and write - it’s just a drag,’ I said. ‘Besides, no-one from the Met seemed to be interested in checking the Folly’s paperwork, so why bother doing it?’

  
‘It’s not like you to make excuses,’ Peter said. ‘It’s possible to test for dyslexia - maybe we could get a secretary if you’ve got it…’

  
‘Later, perhaps,’ I waved my hand dismissively. He was right, damn him, I should admit that reading does not come naturally to me, but the sneers of the schoolmasters before I went to Casterbridge still echo in my ears even though it’s been a hundred years. Are you stupid or lazy, boy? At Casterbridge, most of the Masters did not concern themselves with my poor book-learning since I was a good Rugby player and picked up magic with ease. My friends had drilled me aloud in Latin, and nothing else had mattered.

  
I made excuses for Laurent as well. He was finding the loss of his eye and his lameness hard, a boy who had grown up without a father is bound to chafe when he’s presented with my paternalistic interest in his welfare, not everyone is blessed with the patience of a nurse. Excuses, excuses. I didn’t want to see the darkness in Laurent. I didn’t ask what had happened to any of his pets.

 

1966, August Bank Holiday

  
Who would have thought that the old man had so much blood in him? I thought. Paterston’s withered body shouldn’t have been able to hold such a volume of blood. It had overflowed from the basin, was dripping onto the floor, and covered Laurent’s face and arms. David’s laboratory was a charnel house again.

  
Laurent looked at me through his mask of blood. ‘You were supposed to stay away,’ he said.

  
‘From what?’ I asked. I took a few steps into the lab, and he flung up an arm covered in a blood-drenched sleeve.

  
‘No closer,’ he said.

  
The blood magic was fizzling with strength and his command halted me. This wasn’t a simple murder in revenge for his father’s death, I realised. Laurent had studied, he’d possibly practiced with animals, and he had created a link between our world and another. He’d found out something about Paterston that made his blood into a source of magic that almost any other Wizard’s death would not fulfil.

  
‘What have you done?’ I asked him.

  
‘A ghost father is better than no father at all,’ he said. ‘You robbed me of him, you and this fool of a man who wanted to be wreathed in glory. You forced my father to choose between pleasing you and his conscience.’  
He said something in Ancient Greek, and I saw a wisp of a ghost approach the bowl of blood and drink. Homer, my mind supplied. Odysseus goes to the Underworld to talk to Tiresias and find the way home, and blood for the dead to drink means that they can talk to the living.

  
And then the dead spoke.

  
‘Thomas, I’m sorry,’ David said.

  
‘I’m sorry too,’ I said. ‘You should have been able to tell me what you thought of the Black Library. I let you down. And I’m sorry about your son. I have let him down, too.’

  
David seemed to have been unaware of Laurent before I mentioned him. He turned, and I could see the shade recoil from the dreadful sight. A man who is covered in the blood of his murder victim looks evil. It’s not the same as a man covered in the blood of an accident victim whom he has tried to save.

  
‘Father,’ Laurent said, ‘why did you leave me?’

  
‘I left you because I thought that the world would be a better place without me in it,’ David said.

  
‘No,’ I said immediately. ‘It wasn’t - it isn’t.’

  
‘I understand that now,’ David said, ‘but it’s too late. I regret my actions. I should have stayed alive. Laurent would never have done this, Thomas, if I had not died by my own hand. Be merciful.’

  
‘I took an oath,’ I reminded him. I’d sworn to find any man who killed another for magical purposes and to execute him. Paterston had sworn the same oath.

  
‘By that oath, you should have killed me too,’ David said.

  
‘By that oath,’ I said, ‘you should have died, as should I. War makes criminals out of us all.’

  
‘Be merciful to my son,’ David said. He didn’t sound hopeful.

  
‘Father,’ Laurent said, and his voice was shaking like a ten-year-old’s, ‘what do you mean?’

  
‘I killed men for magical power,’ David said. ‘That brings a death sentence by the oldest Laws of the land. You have done the same thing.’

  
‘He was barely alive,’ Laurent said. ‘What made this’ - and he kicked Paterston’s corpse - ‘a man? What made him human? He eats and drinks and shits, but he can’t remember that he killed my father.’

  
‘He had thoughts once,’ I said. ‘I will not look at a man and say he is not a man. That’s what the Nazis did.’

  
‘Your duty is to guide your apprentice,’ David’s ghost whispered. ‘Thomas, be merciful.’

  
‘My duty is not to train an apprentice who does not uphold the Law. My duty is to the Law and my oaths. Laurent, you have condemned yourself twice over. As an apprentice and as a Wizard. My mercy is that you will not suffer.’  
I stepped through the prohibition that Laurent had laid on me, brushing off the spells as though they were cobwebs. I’d taken an oath, and in pursuit of my duties no Newtonian spell could stand against me. It was some of the strongest magic that the Folly could command. It was the reason that I had been able to walk unimpeded into Ettersburg when the Nazi defences should have stood against my shade, the reason Paterston had led the expeditionary force of Wizards into the stronghold, the basis for Paterston’s belief that the Folly should have more political power, the reason David had been convinced that other sources of magical power were possible. The magic that I was shielded by was something older than Newtonian, something different - it was somehow tied into the Realm and drawing on its virtue.

  
Through his mask of blood, I saw his face turn to panic. The spell to end his life was already lined up, but as I released it he threw the basin of blood at me. Magically charged blood; blood which had thinned a Veil. I should have dropped after him into death but the tangle of spells and oaths - mine, his, Paterston’s and the strange magic which I had drawn on through my first oath to the Realm - sent me somewhere else.

Present day

  
Peter was uncharacteristically silent. His head was bowed and he wasn’t meeting my eyes.

  
‘The Law regarding the death penalty for using a death for magical power was written down at some time in the eleventh century, although that codification was based on a tradition which my Master thought had originated with the Romans,’ I said. ‘I think differently, now - the Law is too tightly bound in with the Realm to come from a foreign invader.’

  
Now was not the time for a history lesson, but I wanted to have a break from the memories. Laurent had fallen backwards onto the floor of the laboratory, his mouth open and his eyes unmoving and his head had bounced on the tiles. Men do not fall like that unless they are dead. Their eyes stay still in their sockets and even though novelists hold that a dead man stares at the ceiling, he doesn’t. He stares at nothing.

  
‘I believe some reformers were keen on changing it in the late nineteenth century - but a wizard who will kill for power is too dangerous to lock up. The only solution was death to the murderer.’

  
I wanted him to understand. I valued his judgement more than I had realised and now he was preparing to judge me. I wanted his forgiveness, his absolution, as much as I’d wanted it from anyone I’d ever met. I wanted his oddly-coloured eyes to turn to me and I wanted to hear his mellifluous voice and rough London accent telling me that it was completely understandable, and he would have done the same thing.

  
‘When Sky died,’ he began, and I froze. His voice was thick: his throat was choking him. Sky had been the sort of playful innocent that a Policeman always wants to protect. He’d failed to realise that the trees of Skygarden were vulnerable and Sky alongside them. I knew he blamed himself.

  
‘When Sky died, the man who’d used the chain saw drowned on dry land,’ he said. His voice was firmer. ‘Leslie thought that Nicky had killed him. But it wasn’t her, was it? It wasn’t any of the Rivers.’  
I’d given my oath as a soldier that Sky’s murderers would not escape justice, and Oberon - Oberon, no less - had agreed that the matter should be left in my hands. They hadn’t been shielded by the complex spells that the Faceless Man used to deflect my tracking spells. A magical murder leaves a taint and I’d followed that taint to a moving van.

  
We used to have a team of wizards to handle these matters, and now there was just me. It made the spells infinitely more complicated since they had to be juggled. Conjuring water isn’t hard. Conjuring it inside a man’s chest is harder. Conjuring it at a distance, with a target in a moving vehicle, is extremely difficult. I had hoped that Faceless had been suitably impressed and startled by the power I commanded, just as I had been after he roasted his safe-cracker.

  
‘I killed him,’ I said.

  
‘You were wrong to do that,’ he said. He was still looking down. ‘He had no idea that chopping down that tree would kill Sky. That’s manslaughter, not murder. He didn’t deserve a death sentence under whatever law you think you’re upholding. You’re acting as judge, jury and executioner. You have no right to do that.’

  
‘Then there is no-one who can do anything at all when murder is committed by magical means,’ I said. That was all the justification I had. That, and habit: meting out the death penalty had always been part of the job for me. ‘There will be no justice if I – we – do not enforce it. It’s not what you signed on for, I know - you thought you’d be nicking villains and put them in front of a Judge so they could be sent to prison. If you decide,’ I stopped and took a mouthful of my beer, ‘if you decide that you want to be released from your oath to me, I won’t hold you to it.’

  
He did so remind me of David: the playful interest he took in magic was only part of it. David had only wanted to research for the sake of knowledge. He had never taken the results and application of his research into consideration until he had seen the first death from haemomancy. Peter wanted the pleasure of learning magic, but not the consequences of being Magical Law Enforcement.

  
‘You can’t decide who lives and who dies,’ he said.

  
‘Agreed,’ I said, startling myself. ‘I won’t execute anyone in cold blood unless we both agree that is the only course available to us.’

  
The stain of war was in me and I needed someone who had never had his ideals challenged in desperate panicked situations to help me see past it. Peter had to learn to judge who should live and who should die: I shouldn’t do it myself no matter how much I wanted to shield him from it.

  
He didn’t answer, and the silence made my fear that he would disagree grow. I wondered if I was asking too much of him. A warranted execution, with a jury of Wizards deciding on the best course of action, had always felt better to me. I hadn’t been responsible for deciding who lived and who died: I’d simply carried out orders, and then when there were no more Wizards, I had done the job of many because no other course of action was available to me. Was I forcing Peter to warrant me?  
‘You’ll expect me to carry out executions,’ he said eventually.

  
‘You killed the Pale Lady,’ I pointed out.

  
‘That was an accident,’ he argued.

  
Manslaughter, not murder, I thought. Distinctions are important. I needed Peter more than I had originally thought. I needed the fierce wail of the youthfully idealistic - that’s not fair - to remind me that the old world of battle and sudden death was no more.  
‘What would you have done if you had succeeded in arresting her?’ I asked him. ‘She killed several men that we know of and would have killed again. They don’t die naturally of old age. The literature is scanty on them, but Father Thames told me that they kill once, maybe twice a month. Faceless had been feeding men to her to keep her happy. That nightclub… It was a charnel house. And people watched, Peter, they sat and watched men get mutilated by a vagina dentata - but the victims didn’t go to hospital afterwards. They were fed to the chimeras while they were still alive and screaming and while people watched...’

  
‘Alright, I get it,’ Peter snapped at me. ‘I’ll say it. She should have been executed. You’re a fucking self-righteous thug, Nightingale. You dress smart and you stand for ladies and you quote dead Romans and you’re a murdering self-righteous thug.’  
He was angry with me, and I could see that the anger was driven by the dismay of comprehension. Lesley had chosen Faceless and his horrific murders over me and I had shown myself to be utterly ruthless when it came to disciplining wayward apprentices. There might be no grand reconciliation between me and Lesley. Peter understood that I could kill her and that I would be right to do so. I hoped that he could show me another way.

  
‘That’s more or less what Arthur said,’ I said.

1966

  
I was lying on a stony shore. Not the sea: the wavelets were too weak for even the most peaceful lagoon. This was water stirred only by the wind passing over it. I could hear voices, so I dragged myself onto my feet and started walking towards them. I felt magically shocked, in much the same way as I had after Justin Smith had blown a hole through eleven inches of iron.  
The voices were a Court, sitting under the apple trees at long trestle tables. In the centre was Arthur.  
Meeting Arthur, talking to him, was indescribable. I still can’t recall him without weeping. He was Britain’s last hope back in the Dark Ages and I can understand why: he was the good man who could look into the darkness and defeat it and wait in seclusion until he was needed again.

  
Confronting evil leaves a stain on even the best person’s soul, a stain which shouldn’t be allowed to spread through society because it carries in it the shadow of the defeated evil. Avalon was split from Britain because of the damage that Arthur had done to his own soul. He had given up his dream of Camelot to become a murdering thug, the man Britain needed. He knew what I had done, and why, and he understood all of it because he would have done the same thing. But the stain of war remained on him, just as it did on me.

  
Merlin, on the other hand, was less comforting to talk to.

  
‘You have earned your place at my table, Nightingale,’ Arthur said to me, ‘but Merlin tells me that you cannot take it up yet.’

  
‘Ghosts are fearful beings,’ Merlin said. ‘Some ghosts are too full of fear to leave the world. What scares you?’

  
‘I know I’ll die at my post,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t scare me. But what will happen to the Folly after I’ve gone? There are secrets in there and I can’t leave them unguarded.’

  
‘You’ll die at your post,’ Merlin agreed. ‘That is your fate, it is the fate you have chosen, and it is the fate which was chosen for you.’

  
Bloody seers. ‘That is your fate,’ was entirely sufficient to make his point clear.

  
‘If you will agree to return here after your destiny has been fulfilled, then I will grant you a boon,’ Merlin continued.

  
‘Thank you for the offer,’ I said cautiously. The old tales had been clear: treating with Wizards from the Dark Ages wasn’t always a good idea. They were honourable, but their honour wasn’t quite the same as everyone else’s. It made them unpredictable.  
‘I will give you a chance to meet a worthy successor,’ he said, ‘if you agree that The Summer Country will then be graced with your presence, and you agree that you will wait with us until Britain needs us, and you will fight alongside us when we are called with the Horn and the Drum into battle once more.’

  
I was a good Christian, as much as anyone who had doubted God’s mercy after seeing what the Nazis had done could still be called a good Christian. I had attended church at school and when the occasion demanded it. After death, I should unthinkingly expect to go to heaven because I had lived and died as an English gentleman should.

  
The children giggled under the apple trees. They were playing in the dappled sunlight. I could smell roasting meat and hear the lazy boasting of Percival as he stroked a whetstone along his sword. Justin Smith hammered metal in his forge. Arthur was walking arm-in-arm with me along the shore of the lake. I thought of his kindness towards me, his understanding that fighting for a noble cause was worth losing personal honour, and I wanted to call him my King and say that my duty was to him.  
Could heaven be like this? I didn’t know. But this was good enough for me.

  
‘A worthy successor,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  
Merlin smiled at me, slippery as an eel in mud. ‘Just what I said,’ he assured me. ‘Someone who will take up your responsibilities with as much dedication as you have given them.’

  
‘How will I know him?’

  
‘Someone will come to you,’ Merlin said. ‘There is testing and trials. I know you, Nightingale. You want to be sure that your successor won’t shirk or you’ll claim the bargain is unfulfilled.’

  
At the risk of repeating myself: bloody seers.

  
‘And if I die without leaving a worthy successor?’

  
‘Then our agreement is not binding,’ he said lightly, ‘and you will walk the Earth as a ghost. There is nothing I can do to overcome your determination to do your duty.’

  
‘I agree,’ I said.

  
He stepped in front of me and kissed my forehead, and I felt that he’d created a spell more complex than anything that even David could manage and pinned it onto me. He’d done it as easily and naturally as a cook assembles an apple pie.

  
‘I will see you again,’ Arthur said, and let go of my arm.

 

Present day

  
Not that I told all of this to Peter, of course. Claiming an after-death spot at Arthur’s table felt like boasting. And Peter might not be the person that Merlin was talking about. Laying a Destiny on the lad by mistake was simply not cricket. I omitted the bargain I had made with Merlin that a successor would take over my post, and said instead that Merlin had expressed dismay that the great leaps forward taken by Newton would be forgotten with my death. He had said that, but he had seemed to see it as an inevitable event instead of one which could be averted.

  
‘It was a few years later that I realised I wasn’t getting older,’ I said. ‘Merlin hadn’t mentioned that to me, of course. I can only surmise that Varvara got caught up in the backwash from Merlin’s spell. As he returned me to the Folly and activated the spell he’d placed on me, I could feel that he was surprised by the way his spell spread. I can guess that the residual magic in the world of Men should have acted as a natural limit to it, but there was too little magic to act as a brake.’  
‘Like friction,’ Peter agreed. ‘Do you know how far it spread before it did stop?’

  
‘No,’ I said. I’d been distracted by crying over David’s son’s body. ‘Varvara was in Wimbledon. So that’s most of London… I had no idea that it could have caused another quasi-Newtonian practitioner to age backwards. There could easily be others.’

  
Wizards who couldn’t bring themselves to trust the Folly. Wizards who had escaped the chaos of Germany after the war and had hidden in London. Wizards trained by Wheatcroft, who had been greedy for power and careless of who wielded that power. Faceless knew spells that I didn’t, and my greatest fear now was that he knew of the existence of the Black Library because he had helped create it or had helped steal it. I could not leave my post to fight him until my post was filled by my successor. Arthur would understand and the Summer Country could wait. There was something I needed to do.

 

'I want to go to the School tomorrow,' I said. 'I should add a couple of names to the wall.' Paterston and Laurent wouldn't have died had it not been for the war. 

 

'You can show me how it's done,' Peter said.

 

'I thought I'd go horse-riding afterwards,' I added. Punishing myself for surviving by refusing to do anything that I enjoyed was futile - it wouldn't bring any of them back. 

 

Peter turned back to his computer. I thought that he was rejecting me for a moment, but then I saw a picture of a whiskery horse nose fill his screen. 'It's still there,' he said. 'The website says we need to book in advance. I've never been horse-riding. is it hard?' He looked a little anxious. A city boy like Peter wouldn't come across animals larger than a dog in his day-to-day life but he was willing to meet half a ton of horseflesh because of me.

 

'You'll pick it up,' I said. He was going to try so I wouldn't be alone with my thoughts. I was touched.

  
For years, I had wanted to avoid looking at the stain left in me by the War through other peoples’ eyes. I had wanted to keep the shadow inside me away from everyone. I had thought that I was doing the right thing, hiding myself from the world in the Folly, but I had been wrong. I wouldn’t argue that Hugh, for example, should be cut off from the world for fear of what he brought into it. Someone like Peter would never have agreed that I should bear this burden alone. I had forgotten how good humanity could be, given the chance.


End file.
